Secret Societies And Subversive Movements

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Nesta H. Webster

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Title: Secret Societies And Subversive Movements

Author: Nesta H. Webster

Release Date: August 23, 2006 [EBook #19104]

Language: English

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SECRET SOCIETIES

and

SUBVERSIVE MOVEMENTS

by

NESTA H. WEBSTER

CHRISTIAN BOOK CLUB OF AMERICA

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Chevalier de Boufflers

The French Revolution

World Revolution

The Socialist Network

The Surrender of an Empire

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette: Before the Revolution

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette: During the Revolution

Spacious Days

There is in Italy a power which we seldom mention in this House ... I mean the secret societies.... It is useless to deny, because it is impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe--the whole of Italy and France and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries--is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads. And what are their objects? They do not attempt to conceal them. They do not want constitutional government; they do not want ameliorated institutions ... they want to change the tenure of land, to drive out the present owners of the soil and to put an end to ecclesiastical establishments. Some of them may go further.... (DISRAELI in the House of Commons, July 14, 1856.)

PREFACE

It is a matter of some regret to me that I have been so far unable to continue the series of studies on the French Revolution of which The Chevalier de Boufflers and The French Revolution, a Study in Democracy formed the first two volumes. But the state of the world at the end of the Great War seemed to demand an enquiry into the present phase of the revolutionary movement, hence my attempt to follow its course up to modern times in World Revolution. And now before returning to that first cataclysm I have felt impelled to devote one more book to the Revolution as a whole by going this time further back into the past and attempting to trace its origins from the first century of the Christian era. For it is only by taking a general survey of the movement that it is possible to understand the causes of any particular phase of its existence. The French Revolution did not arise merely out of conditions or ideas peculiar to the eighteenth century, nor the Bolshevist Revolution out of political and social conditions in Russia or the teaching of Karl Marx. Both these explosions were produced by forces which, making use of popular suffering and discontent, had long been gathering strength for an onslaught not only on Christianity, but on all social and moral order.

It is of immense significance to notice with what resentment this point of view is met in certain quarters. When I first began to write on revolution a well-known London publisher said to me, Remember that if you take an anti-revolutionary line you will have the whole literary world against you. This appeared to me extraordinary. Why should the literary world sympathize with a movement which from the French Revolution onwards has always been directed against literature, art, and science, and has openly proclaimed its aim to exalt the manual workers over the intelligentsia? Writers must be proscribed as the most dangerous enemies of the people, said Robespierre; his colleague Dumas said all clever men should be guillotined. The system of persecution against men of talents was organized.... They cried out in the sections of Paris, 'Beware of that man for he has written a book!'¹ Precisely the same policy has been followed in Russia. Under Moderate Socialism in Germany the professors, not the people, are starving in garrets. Yet the whole press of our country is permeated with subversive influences. Not merely in partisan works, but in manuals of history or literature for use in Schools, Burke is reproached for warning us against the French Revolution and Carlyle's panegyric is applauded. And whilst every slip on the part of an anti-revolutionary writer is seized on by the critics and held up as an example of the whole, the most glaring errors not only of conclusions but of facts pass unchallenged if they happen to be committed by a partisan of the movement. The principle laid down by Collot d'Herbois still holds good: Tout est permis pour quiconque agit dans le sens de la révolution.

All this was unknown to me when I first embarked on my work. I knew that French writers of the past had distorted facts to suit their own political views, that a conspiracy of history is still directed by certain influences in the masonic lodges and the Sorbonne; I did not know that this conspiracy was being carried on in this country. Therefore the publisher's warning did not daunt me. If I was wrong either in my conclusions or facts I was prepared to be challenged. Should not years of laborious historical research meet either with recognition or with reasoned and scholarly refutation? But although my book received a great many generous and appreciative reviews in the press, criticisms which were hostile took a form which I had never anticipated. Not a single honest attempt was made to refute either my French Revolution or World Revolution by the usual methods of controversy; statements founded on documentary evidence were met with flat contradiction unsupported by a shred of counter evidence. In general the plan adopted was not to disprove, but to discredit by means of flagrant misquotations, by attributing to me views I had never expressed, or even by means of offensive personalities. It will surely be admitted that this method of attack is unparalleled in any other sphere of literary controversy.

It is interesting to notice that precisely the same line was adopted a hundred years ago with regard to Professor Robison and the Abbé Barruel, whose works on the secret causes of the French Revolution created an immense sensation in their day. The legitimate criticisms that might have been made on their work find no place in the diatribes levelled against them; their enemies content themselves merely with calumnies and abuse. A contemporary American writer, Seth Payson, thus describes the methods employed to discredit them:

The testimony of Professor Robison and Abbé Barruel would doubtless have been considered as ample in any case which did not interest the prejudices and passions of men against them. The scurrility and odium with which they have been loaded is perfectly natural, and what the nature of their testimony would have led one to expect. Men will endeavour to invalidate that evidence which tends to unveil their dark designs: and it cannot be expected that those who believe that the end sanctifies the means will be very scrupulous as to their measures. Certainly he was not who invented the following character and arbitrarily applied it to Dr. Robison, which might have been applied with as much propriety to any other person in Europe or America. The character here referred to, is taken from the American Mercury, printed at Hartford, September 26, 1799, by E. Babcock. In this paper, on the pretended authority of Professor Ebeling, we are told that Robison had lived too fast for his income, and to supply deficiencies had undertaken to alter a bank bill, that he was detected and fled to France; that having been expelled the Lodge in Edinburgh, he applied in France for the second grade, but was refused; that he made the same attempt in Germany and afterwards in Russia, but never succeeded; and from this entertained the bitterest hatred to masonry; and after wandering about Europe for two years, by writing to Secretary Dundas, and presenting a copy of his book, which, it was judged, would answer certain purposes of the ministry, the prosecution against him was stopped, the Professor returned in triumph to his country, and now lives upon a handsome pension, instead of suffering the fate of his predecessor Dodd.²

Payson goes on to quote a writer in The National Intelligencer of January 1801, who styles himself a friend to truth and speaks of Professor Robison as a man distinguished by abject dependence on a party, by the base crimes of forgery and adultery, and by frequent paroxysms of insanity. Mounier goes further still, and in his pamphlet De l'influence attribuée aux Philosophes, ... Francs-maçons et ... Illuminés, etc., inspired by the Illuminatus Bode, quotes a story that Robison suffered from a form of insanity which consisted in his believing that the posterior portion of his body was made of glass!³

In support of all this farrago of nonsense there is of course no foundation of truth; Robison was a well-known savant who lived sane and respected to the end of his days. On his death Watt wrote of him: He was a man of the clearest head and the most science of anybody I have ever known.⁴ John Playfair, in a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1815, whilst criticizing his Proofs of a Conspiracy--though at the same time admitting he had himself never had access to the documents Robison had consulted!--paid the following tribute to his character and erudition:

His range in science was most extensive; he was familiar with the whole circle of the accurate sciences.... Nothing can add to the esteem which they [i.e. those who were personally acquainted with him] felt for his talents and worth or to the respect in which they now hold his memory.⁵

Nevertheless, the lies circulated against both Robison and Barruel were not without effect. Thirteen years later we find another American, this time a Freemason, confessing with shame and grief and indignation that he had been carried away by the flood of vituperation poured upon Barruel and Robison during the past thirty years, that the title pages of their works were fearful to him, and that although wishing calmly and candidly to investigate the character of Freemasonry he refused for months to open their books. Yet when in 1827 he read them for the first time he was astonished to find that they showed a manifest tendency towards Freemasonry. Both Barruel and Robison, he now realized, were learned men, candid men, lovers of their country, who had a reverence for truth and religion. They give the reasons for their opinions, they quote their authorities, naming the author and page, like honest people; they both had a wish to rescue British Masonry from the condemnation and fellowship of continental Masonry and appear to be sincerely actuated by the desire of doing good by giving their labours to the public.⁶

That the author was right here in his description of Barruel's attitude to Freemasonry is shown by Barruel's own words on the subject:

England above all is full of those upright men, excellent citizens, men of every kind and in every condition of life, who count it an honour to be masons, and who are distinguished from other men only by ties which seem to strengthen those of benevolence and fraternal charity. It is not the fear of offending a nation amongst which I have found a refuge which prompts me to make this exception. Gratitude would prevail with me over all such terrors and I should say in the midst of London: England is lost, she will not escape the French Revolution if the masonic lodges resemble those I have to unveil. I would even say more: government and all Christianity would long ago have been lost in England if one could suppose its Freemasons to be initiated into the last mysteries of the sect.⁷

In another passage Barruel observes that Masonry in England is a society composed of good citizens in general whose chief object is to help each other by principles of equality which for them is nothing else but universal fraternity.⁸ And again: Let us admire it [the wisdom of England] for having known how to make a real source of benefit to the State out of those same mysteries which elsewhere conceal a profound conspiracy against the State and religion.⁹

The only criticism British Freemasons may make on this verdict is that Barruel regards Masonry as a system which originally contained an element of danger that has been eliminated in England whilst they regard it as a system originally innocuous into which a dangerous element was inserted on the Continent. Thus according to the former conception Freemasonry might be compared to one of the brass shell-cases brought back from the battle-fields of France and converted into a flower-pot holder, whilst according to the latter it resembles an innocent brass flower-pot holder which has been used as a receptacle for explosives. The fact is that, as I shall endeavour to show in the course of this book, Freemasonry being a composite system there is some justification for both these theories. In either case it will be seen that Continental Masonry alone stands condemned.

The plan of representing Robison and Barruel as the enemies of British Masonry can therefore only be regarded as a method for discrediting them in the eyes of British Freemasons, and consequently for bringing the latter over to the side of their antagonists. Exactly the same method of attack has been directed against those of us who during the last few years have attempted to warn the world of the secret forces working to destroy civilization; in my own case even the plan of accusing me of having attacked British Masonry has been adopted without the shadow of a foundation. From the beginning I have always differentiated between British and Grand Orient Masonry, and have numbered high British Masons amongst my friends.

But what is the main charge brought against us? Like Robison and Barruel, we are accused of raising a false alarm, of creating a bogey, or of being the victims of an obsession. Up to a point this is comprehensible. Whilst on the Continent the importance of secret societies is taken as a matter of course and the libraries of foreign capitals teem with books on the question, people in this country really imagine that secret societies are things of the past--articles to this effect appeared quite recently in two leading London newspapers--whilst practically nothing of any value has been written about them in our language during the last hundred years. Hence ideas that are commonplaces on the Continent here appear sensational and extravagant. The mind of the Englishman does not readily accept anything he cannot see or even sometimes anything he can see which is unprecedented in his experience, so that like the West American farmer, confronted for the first time by the sight of a giraffe, his impulse is to cry out angrily: I don't believe it!

But whilst making all allowance for honest ignorance and incredulity, it is impossible not to recognize a certain method in the manner in which the cry of obsession or bogey is raised. For it will be noticed that people who specialize on other subjects are not described as obsessed. We did not hear, for example, that the late Professor Einstein had Relativity on the brain because he wrote and lectured exclusively on this question, nor do we hear it suggested that Mr. Howard Carter is obsessed with the idea of Tutankhamen and that it would be well if he were to set out for the South Pole by way of a change. Again, all those who warn the world concerning eventualities they conceive to be a danger are not accused of creating bogeys. Thus although Lord Roberts was denounced as a scaremonger for urging the country to prepare for defence against a design openly avowed by Germany both in speech and print, and in 1921 the Duke of Northumberland was declared the victim of a delusion for believing in the existence of a plot against the British Empire which had been proclaimed in a thousand revolutionary harangues and pamphlets. People who, without bothering to produce a shred of documentary evidence, had sounded the alarm on the menace of French Imperialism and asserted that our former Allies were engaged in building a vast fleet of aeroplanes in order to attack our coasts. They were not held to be either scaremongers or insane. On the contrary, although some of these same people were proved by events to have been completely wrong in their prognostications at the beginning of the Great War, they are still regarded as oracles and sometimes even described as thinking for half Europe.

Another instance of this kind may be cited in the case of Mr. John Spargo, author of a small book entitled The Jew and American Ideals. On page 37 of this work Mr. Spargo in refuting the accusations brought against the Jews observes:

Belief in widespread conspiracies directed against individuals or the state is probably the commonest form assumed by the human mind when it loses its balance and its sense of proportion.

Yet on page 6 Mr. Spargo declares that when visiting this country in September and October 1920:

I found in England great nation-wide organizations, obviously well financed, devoted to the sinister purpose of creating anti-Jewish feeling and sentiment. I found special articles in influential newspapers devoted to the same evil purpose. I found at at least one journal, obviously well financed again, exclusively devoted to the fostering of suspicion, fear, and hatred against the Jew ... and in the bookstores I discovered a whole library of books devoted to the same end.

It will be seen then that a belief in widespread conspiracies is not always to be regarded as a sign of loss of mental balance, even when these conspiracies remain completely invisible to the general public. For those of us who were in London during the period of Mr. Spargo's visit saw nothing of the things he here describes. Where, we ask, were these great nation-wide organizations striving to create anti-Jewish sentiments? What were their names? By whom were they led? It is true, however, that there were nation-wide organizations in existence here at this date instituted for the purpose of combating Bolshevism. Is anti-Bolshevism then synonymous with anti-Semitism?¹⁰ This is the conclusion to which one is inevitably led. For it will be noticed that anyone who attempts to expose the secret forces behind the revolutionary movement, whether he mentions Jews in this connexion or even if he goes out of his way to exonerate them, will incur the hostility of the Jews and their friends and will still be described as anti-Semite. The realization of this fact has led me particularly to include the Jews in the study of secret societies.

The object of the present book is therefore to carry further the enquiry I began in World Revolution, by tracing the course of revolutionary ideas through secret societies from the earliest times, indicating the rôle of the Jews only where it is to be clearly detected, but not seeking to implicate them where good evidence is not forthcoming. For this reason I shall not base assertions on merely anti-Semite works, but principally on the writings of the Jews themselves. In the same way with regard to secret societies I shall rely as far as possible on the documents and admissions of their members, on which point I have been able to collect a great deal of fresh data entirely corroborating my former thesis. It should be understood that I do not propose to give a complete history of secret societies, but only of secret societies in their relation to the revolutionary movement. I shall therefore not attempt to describe the theories of occultism nor to enquire into the secrets of Freemasonry, but simply to relate the history of these systems in order to show the manner in which they have been utilized for a subversive purpose. If I then fail to convince the incredulous that secret forces of revolution exist, it will not be for want of evidence.

Nesta H. Webster.

CONTENTS

Preface

PART I THE PAST

THE ANCIENT SECRET TRADITION

THE REVOLT AGAINST ISLAM

THE TEMPLARS

THREE CENTURIES OF OCCULTISM

THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY

THE GRAND LODGE ERA

GERMAN TEMPLARISM AND FRENCH ILLUMINISM

THE JEWISH CABALISTS

THE BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI

THE CLIMAX

PART II THE PRESENT

MODERN FREEMASONRY

SECRET SOCIETIES IN ENGLAND

OPEN SUBVERSIVE MOVEMENTS

PAN-GERMANISM

THE REAL JEWISH PERIL

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX:

JEWISH EVIDENCE ON THE TALMUD

THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION

INDEX

Part I

The Past

1. The Ancient Secret Tradition

The East is the cradle of secret societies. For whatever end they may have been employed, the inspiration and methods of most of those mysterious associations which have played so important a part behind the scenes of the world's history will be found to have emanated from the lands where the first recorded acts of the great human drama were played out--Egypt, Babylon, Syria, and Persia. On the one hand Eastern mysticism, on the other Oriental love of intrigue, framed the systems later on to be transported to the West with results so tremendous and far-reaching.

In the study of secret societies we have then a double line to follow--the course of associations enveloping themselves in secrecy for the pursuit of esoteric knowledge, and those using mystery and secrecy for an ulterior and, usually, a political purpose.

But esotericism again presents a dual aspect. Here, as in every phase of earthly life, there is the revers de la médaille--white and black, light and darkness, the Heaven and Hell of the human mind. The quest for hidden knowledge may end with initiation into divine truths or into dark and abominable cults. Who knows with what forces he may be brought in contact beyond the veil? Initiation which leads to making use of spiritual forces, whether good or evil, is therefore capable of raising man to greater heights or of degrading him to lower depths than he could ever have reached by remaining on the purely physical plane. And when men thus unite themselves in associations, a collective force is generated which may exercise immense influence over the world around. Hence the importance of secret societies.

Let it be said once and for all, secret societies have not always been formed for evil purposes. On the contrary, many have arisen from the highest aspirations of the human mind--the desire for a knowledge of eternal verities. The evil arising from such systems has usually consisted in the perversion of principles that once were pure and holy. If I do not insist further on this point, it is because a vast literature has already been devoted to the subject, so that it need only be touched on briefly here.

Now, from the earliest times groups of Initiates or Wise Men have existed, claiming to be in possession of esoteric doctrines known as the Mysteries, incapable of apprehension by the vulgar, and relating to the origin and end of man, the life of the soul after death, and the nature of God or the gods. It is this exclusive attitude which constitutes the essential difference between the Initiates of the ancient world and the great Teachers of religion with whom modern occultists seek to confound them. For whilst religious leaders such as Buddha and Mohammed sought for divine knowledge in order that they might impart it to the world, the Initiates believed that sacred mysteries should not be revealed to the profane but should remain exclusively in their own keeping, although the desire for initiation might spring from the highest aspiration, the gratification, whether real or imaginary, of this desire often led to spiritual arrogance and abominable tyranny, resulting in the fearful trials, the tortures physical and mental, ending even at times in death, to which the neophyte was subjected by his superiors.

The Mysteries

According to a theory current in occult and masonic circles, certain ideas were common to all the more important Mysteries, thus forming a continuous tradition handed down through succeeding groups of Initiates of different ages and countries. Amongst these ideas is said to have been the conception of the unity of God. Whilst to the multitude it was deemed advisable to preach polytheism, since only in this manner could the plural aspects of the Divine be apprehended by the multitude, the Initiates themselves believed in the existence of one Supreme Being, the Creator of the Universe, pervading and governing all things, Le Plongeon, whose object is to show an affinity between the sacred Mysteries of the Mayas and of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, asserts that The idea of a sole and omnipotent Deity, who created all things, seems to have been the universal belief in early ages, amongst all the nations that had reached a high degree of civilization. This was the doctrine of the Egyptian priests.¹¹ The same writer goes on to say that the doctrine of a Supreme Deity composed of three parts distinct from each other, yet forming one, was universally prevalent among the civilized nations of America, Asia, and the Egyptians, and that the priests and learned men of Egypt, Chaldea, India, or China ...kept it a profound secret and imparted it only to a few select among those initiated in the sacred mysteries.¹² This view has been expressed by many other writers, yet lacks historical proof.

That monotheism existed in Egypt before the days of Moses is, however, certain. Adolf Erman asserts that even in early times the educated class believed all the deities of the Egyptian religion to be identical and that the priests did not shut their eyes to this doctrine, but strove to grasp the idea of the one God, divided into different persons by poesy and myth.... The priesthood, however, had not the courage to take the final step, to do away with those distinctions which they declared to be immaterial, and to adore the one God under the one name.¹³ It was left to Amenhotep IV, later known as Ikhnaton, to proclaim this doctrine openly to the people. Professor Breasted has described the hymns of praise to the Sun God which Ikhnaton himself wrote on the walls of the Amarna tomb-chapels:

They show us the simplicity and beauty of the young king's faith in the sole God. He had gained the belief that one God created not only all the lower creatures but also all races of men, both Egyptians and foreigners. Moreover, the king saw in his God a kindly Father, who maintained all his creatures by his goodness.... In all the progress of men which we have followed through thousands of years, no one had ever before caught such a vision of the great Father of all.¹⁴

May not the reason why Ikhnaton was later described as a heretic be that he violated the code of the priestly hierarchy by revealing this secret doctrine to the profane? Hence, too, perhaps the necessity in which the King found himself of suppressing the priesthood, which by persisting in its exclusive attitude kept what he perceived to be the truth from the minds of the people.

The earliest European centre of the Mysteries appears to have been Greece, where the Eleusinian Mysteries existed at a very early date. Pythagoras, who was born in Samos about 582 B.C., spent some years in Egypt, where he was initiated into the Mysteries of Isis. After his return to Greece, Pythagoras is said to have been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and attempted to found a secret society in Samos; but this proving unsuccessful, he journeyed on to Crotona in Italy, where he collected around him a great number of disciples and finally established his sect. This was divided into two classes of Initiates--the first admitted only into the exoteric doctrines of the master, with whom they were not allowed to speak until after a period of five years' probation; the second consisting of the real Initiates, to whom all the mysteries of the esoteric doctrines of Pythagoras were unfolded. This course of instruction, given, after the manner of the Egyptians, by means of images and symbols, began with geometrical science, in which Pythagoras during his stay in Egypt had become an adept, and led up finally to abstruse speculations concerning the transmigration of the soul and the nature of God, who was represented under the conception of a Universal Mind diffused through all things. It is, however, as the precursor of secret societies formed later in the West of Europe that the sect of Pythagoras enters into the scope of this book. Early masonic tradition traces Freemasonry partly to Pythagoras, who is said to have travelled in England, and there is certainly some reason to believe that his geometrical ideas entered into the system of the operative guilds of masons.

The Jewish Cabala

¹⁵

According to Fabre d'Olivet, Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, drew from the Egyptian Mysteries a part of the oral tradition which was handed down through the leaders of the Israelites.¹⁶ That such an oral tradition, distinct from the written word embodied in the Pentateuch, did descend from Moses and that it was later committed to writing in the Talmud and the Cabala is the opinion of many Jewish writers.¹⁷

The first form of the Talmud, called the Mischna, appeared in about the second or third century A.D.; a little later a commentary was added under the name of the Gemara. These two works compose the Jerusalem Talmud, which was revised in the third to the fifth centry[A]. This later edition was named the Babylonian Talmud and is the one now in use.

The Talmud relates mainly to the affairs of everyday life--the laws of buying and selling, of making contracts--also to external religious observances, on all of which the most meticulous details are given. As a Jewish writer has expressed it:

... the oddest rabbinical conceits are elaborated through many volumes with the finest dialectic, and the most absurd questions are discussed with the highest efforts of intellectual power; for example, how many white hairs may a red cow have, and yet remain a red cow; what sort of scabs require this or that purification; whether a louse or a flea may be killed on the Sabbath--the first being allowed, while the second is a deadly sin; whether the slaughter of an animal ought to be executed at the neck or the tail; whether the high priest put on his shirt or his hose first; whether the Jabam, that is, the brother of a man who died childless, being required by law to marry the widow, is relieved from his obligation if he falls off a roof and sticks in the mire.¹⁸

But it is in the Cabala, a Hebrew word signifying reception, that is to say a doctrine orally received, that the speculative and philosophical or rather the theosophical doctrines of Israel are to be found. These are contained in two books, the Sepher Yetzirah and the Zohar.

The Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of the Creation, is described by Edersheim as a monologue on the part of Abraham, in which, by the contemplation of all that is around him, he ultimately arrives at the conclusion of the unity of God¹⁹; but since this process is accomplished by an arrangement of the Divine Emanations under the name of the Ten Sephiroths, and in the permutation of numerals and of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, it would certainly convey no such idea--nor probably indeed any idea at all--to the mind uninitiated into Cabalistic systems. The Sepher Yetzirah is in fact admittedly a work of extraordinary obscurity²⁰ and almost certainly of extreme antiquity. Monsieur Paul Vulliaud, in his exhaustive work on the Cabala recently published,²¹ says that its date has been placed as early as the sixth century before Christ and as late as the tenth century A.D., but that it is at any rate older than the Talmud is shown by the fact that in the Talmud the Rabbis are described as studying it for magical purposes.²² The Sepher Yetzirah is also said to be the work referred to in the Koran under the name of the Book of Abraham.²³

The immense compilation known as the Sepher-Ha-Zohar, or Book of Light, is, however, of greater importance to the study of Cabalistic philosophy. According to the Zohar itself, the Mysteries of Wisdom were imparted to Adam by God whilst he was still in the Garden of Eden, in the form of a book delivered by the angel Razael. From Adam the book passed on to Seth, then to Enoch, to Noah, to Abraham, and later to Moses, one of its principal exponents.²⁴ Other Jewish writers declare, however, that Moses received it for the first time on Mount Sinai and communicated it to the Seventy Elders, by whom it was handed down to David and Solomon, then to Ezra and Nehemiah, and finally to the Rabbis of the early Christian era.²⁵

Until this date the Zohar had remained a purely oral tradition, but now for the first time it is said to have been written down by the disciples of Simon ben Jochai. The Talmud relates that for twelve years the Rabbi Simon and his son Eliezer concealed themselves in a cavern, where, sitting in the sand up to their necks, they meditated on the sacred law and were frequently visited by the prophet Elias.²⁶ In this way, Jewish legend adds, the great book of the Zohar was composed and committed to writing by the Rabbi's son Eliezer and his secretary the Rabbi Abba.²⁷

The first date at which the Zohar is definitely known to have appeared is the end of the thirteenth century, when it was committed to writing by a Spanish Jew, Moses de Leon, who, according to Dr. Ginsburg, said he had discovered and reproduced the original document of Simon ben Jochai; his wife and daughter, however, declared that he had composed it all himself.²⁸ Which is the truth? Jewish opinion is strongly divided on this question, one body maintaining that the Zohar is the comparatively modern work of Moses de Leon, the other declaring it to be of extreme antiquity. M. Vulliaud, who has collated all these views in the course of some fifty pages, shows that although the name Zohar might have originated with Moses de Leon, the ideas it embodied were far older than the thirteenth century. How, he asks pertinently, would it have been possible for the Rabbis of the Middle Ages to have been deceived into accepting as an ancient document a work that was of completely modern origin?²⁹ Obviously the Zohar was not the composition of Moses de Leon, but a compilation made by him from various documents dating from very early times. Moreover, as M. Vulliaud goes on to explain, those who deny its antiquity are the anti-Cabalists, headed by Graetz, whose object is to prove the Cabala to be at variance with orthodox Judaism. Theodore Reinach goes so far as to declare the Cabala to be a subtle poison which enters into the veins of Judaism and wholly infests it; Salomon Reinach calls it one of the worst aberrations of the human mind.³⁰ This view, many a student of the Cabala will hardly dispute, but to say that it is foreign to Judaism is another matter. The fact is that the main ideas of the Zohar find confirmation in the Talmud. As the Jewish Encyclopædia observes, the Cabala is not really in opposition to the Talmud, and many Talmudic Jews have supported and contributed to it.³¹ Adolphe Franck does not hesitate to describe it as the heart and life of Judaism.³² The greater number of the most eminent Rabbis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed firmly in the sacredness of the Zohar and the infallibility of its teaching.³³

The question of the antiquity of the Cabala is therefore in reality largely a matter of names. That a mystical tradition existed amongst the Jews from remote antiquity will hardly be denied by anyone³⁴; it is therefore, as M. Vulliaud observes, only a matter of knowing at what moment Jewish mysticism took the name of Cabala.³⁵ Edersheim asserts that--

It is undeniable that, already at the time of Jesus Christ, there existed an assemblage of doctrines and speculations that were carefully concealed from the multitude. They were not even revealed to ordinary scholars, for fear of leading them towards heretical ideas. This kind bore the name of Kabbalah, and as the term (of Kabbalah, to receive, transmit) indicates, it represented the spiritual traditions transmitted from the earliest ages, although mingled in the course of time with impure or foreign elements.³⁶

Is the Cabala, then, as Gougenot des Mousseaux asserts, older than the Jewish race, a legacy handed down from the first patriarchs of the world?³⁷ We must admit this hypothesis to be incapable of proof, yet it is one that has found so much favour with students of occult traditions that it cannot be ignored. The Jewish Cabala itself supports it by tracing its descent from the patriarchs--Adam, Noah, Enoch, and Abraham--who lived before the Jews as a separate race came into existence. Eliphas Lévi accepts this genealogy, and relates that the Holy Cabala was the tradition of the children of Seth carried out of Chaldea by Abraham, who was the inheritor of the secrets of Enoch and the father of initiation in Israel.³⁸

According to this theory, which we find again propounded by the American Freemason, Dr. Mackey,³⁹ there was, besides the divine Cabala of the children of Seth, the magical Cabala of the children of Cain, which descended to the Sabeists, or star-worshippers, of Chaldea, adepts in astrology and necromancy. Sorcery, as we know, had been practised by the Canaanites before the occupation of Palestine by the Israelites; Egypt India, and Greece also had their soothsayers and diviners. In spite of the imprecations against sorcery contained in the law of Moses, the Jews, disregarding these warnings, caught the contagion and mingled the sacred tradition they had inherited with magical ideas partly borrowed from other races and partly of their own devising. At the same time the speculative side of the Jewish Cabala borrowed from the philosophy of the Persian Magi, of the Neo-Platonists,⁴⁰ and of the Neo-Pythagoreans. There is, then, some justification for the anti-Cabalists' contention that what we know to-day as the Cabala is not of purely Jewish origin.

Gougenot des Mousseaux, who had made a profound study of occultism, asserts that there were therefore two Cabalas: the ancient sacred tradition handed down from the first patriarchs of the human race; and the evil Cabala, wherein this sacred tradition was mingled by the Rabbis with barbaric superstitions, combined with their own imaginings and henceforth marked with their seal.⁴¹ This view also finds expression in the remarkable work of the converted Jew Drach, who refers to--

The ancient and true Cabala, which ... we distinguish from the modern Cabala, false, condemnable, and condemned by the Holy See, the work of the Rabbis, who have also falsified and perverted the Talmudic tradition. The doctors of the Synagogue trace it back to Moses, whilst at the same time admitting that the principal truths it contains were those known by revelation to the first patriarchs of the world.⁴²

Further on Drach quotes the statement of Sixtus of Sienna, another converted Jew and a Dominican, protected by Pius V:

Since by the decree of the Holy Roman Inquisition all books appertaining to the Cabala have lately been condemned, one must know that the Cabala is double; that one is true, the other false. The true and pious one is that which ... elucidates the secret mysteries of the holy law according to the principle of anagogy (i.e. figurative interpretation). This Cabala therefore the Church has never condemned. The false and impious Cabala is a certain mendacious kind of Jewish tradition, full of innumerable vanities and falsehoods, differing but little from necromancy. This kind of superstition, therefore, improperly called Cabala, the Church within the last few years has deservedly condemned.⁴³

The modern Jewish Cabala presents a dual aspect--theoretical and practical; the former concerned with theosophical speculations, the latter with magical practices. It would be impossible here to give an idea of Cabalistic theosophy with its extraordinary imaginings on the Sephiroths, the attributes and functions of good and bad angels, dissertations on the nature of demons, and minute details on the appearance of God under the name of the Ancient of Ancients, from whose head 400,000 worlds receive the light. The length of this face from the top of the head is three hundred and seventy times ten thousand worlds. It is called the 'Long Face,' for such is the name of the Ancient of Ancients.⁴⁴ The description of the hair and beard alone belonging to this gigantic countenance occupies a large place in the Zoharic treatise, Idra Raba.⁴⁵

According to the Cabala, every letter in the Scriptures contains a mystery only to be solved by the initiated.⁴⁶ By means of this system of interpretation passages of the Old Testament are shown to bear meanings totally unapparent to the ordinary reader. Thus the Zohar explains that Noah was lamed for life by the bite of a lion whilst he was in the ark,⁴⁷ the adventures of Jonah inside the whale are related with an extraordinary wealth of imagination,⁴⁸ whilst the beautiful story of Elisha and the Shunnamite woman is travestied in the most grotesque manner.⁴⁹

In the practical Cabala this method of decoding is reduced to a theurgic or magical system in which the healing of diseases plays an important part and is effected by means of the mystical arrangement of numbers and letters, by the pronunciation of the Ineffable Name, by the use of amulets and talismans, or by compounds supposed to contain certain occult properties.

All these ideas derived from very ancient cults; even the art of working miracles by the use of the Divine Name, which after the appropriation of the Cabala by the Jews became the particular practice of Jewish miracle-workers, appears to have originated in Chaldea.⁵⁰ Nor can the insistence on the Chosen People theory, which forms the basis of all Talmudic and Cabalistic writings, be regarded as of purely Jewish origin; the ancient Egyptians likewise believed themselves to be the peculiar people specially loved by the gods.⁵¹ But in the hands of the Jews this belief became a pretension to the exclusive enjoyment of divine favour. According to the Zohar, all Israelites will have a part in the future world,⁵² and on arrival there will not be handed over like the goyim (or non-Jewish races) to the hands of the angel Douma and sent down to Hell.⁵³ Indeed the goyim are even denied human attributes. Thus the Zohar again explains that the words of the Scripture Jehovah Elohim made man mean that He made Israel.⁵⁴ The seventeenth-century Rabbinical treatise Emek ha Melek observes: Our Rabbis of blessed memory have said: 'Ye Jews are men because of the soul ye have from the Supreme Man (i.e. God). But the nations of the world are not styled men because they have not, from the Holy and Supreme Man, the Neschama (or glorious soul), but they have the Nephesch (soul) from Adam Belial, that is the malicious and unnecessary man, called Sammael, the Supreme Devil.'⁵⁵

In conformity with this exclusive attitude towards the rest of the human race, the Messianic idea which forms the dominating theme of the Cabala is made to serve purely Jewish interests. Yet in its origins this idea was possibly not Jewish. It is said by believers in an ancient secret tradition common to other races besides the Jews, that a part of this tradition related to a past Golden Age when man was free from care and evil non-existent, to the subsequent fall of Man and the loss of this primitive felicity, and finally to a revelation received from Heaven foretelling the reparation of this loss and the coming of a Redeemer who should save the world and restore the Golden Age. According to Drach:

The tradition of a Man-God who should present Himself as the teacher and liberator of the fallen human race was constantly taught amongst all the enlightened nations of the globe. Vetus et constans opinio, as Suetonius says. It is of all times and of all places.⁵⁶

And Drach goes on to quote the evidence of Volney, who had travelled in the East and declared that--

The sacred and mythological traditions of earlier times had spread throughout all Asia the belief in a great Mediator who was to come, of a future Saviour, King, God, Conqueror, and Legislator who would bring back the Golden Age to earth and deliver men from the empire of evil.⁵⁷

All that can be said with any degree of certainty with regard to this belief is that it did exist amongst the Zoroastrians of Persia as well as amongst the Jews. D'Herbelot, quoting Abulfaraj, shows that five hundred years before Christ, Zerdascht, the leader of the Zoroastrians, predicted the coming of the Messiah, at whose birth a star would appear. He also told his disciples that the Messiah would be born of a virgin, that they would be the first to hear of Him, and that they should bring Him gifts.⁵⁸

Drach believes that this tradition was taught in the ancient synagogue,⁵⁹ thus explaining the words of St. Paul that unto the Jews were committed the oracles of God⁶⁰:

This oral doctrine, which is the Cabala, had for its object the most sublime truths of the Faith which it brought back incessantly to the promised Redeemer, the foundation of the whole system of the ancient tradition.⁶¹

Drach further asserts that the doctrine of the Trinity formed a part of this tradition:

Whoever has familiarized himself with that which was taught by the ancient doctors of the Synagogue, particularly those who lived before the coming of the Saviour, knows that the Trinity in one God was a truth admitted amongst them from the earliest times.⁶²

M. Vulliaud points out that Graetz admits the existence of this idea in the Zohar: It even taught certain doctrines which appeared favourable to the Christian dogma of the Trinity! And again: It is incontestable that the Zohar makes allusions to the beliefs in the Trinity and the Incarnation.⁶³ M. Vulliaud adds: The idea of the Trinity must therefore play an important part in the Cabala, since it has been possible to affirm that 'the characteristic of the Zohar and its particular conception is its attachment to the principle of the Trinity,'⁶⁴ and further quotes Edersheim as saying that a great part of the explanation given in the writings of the Cabalists resembles in a surprising manner the highest truths of Christianity.⁶⁵ It would appear, then, that certain remnants of the ancient secret tradition lingered on in the Cabala. The Jewish Encyclopædia, perhaps unintentionally, endorses this opinion, since in deriding the sixteenth-century Christian Cabalists for asserting that the Cabala contained traces of Christianity, it goes on to say that what appears to be Christian in the Cabala is only ancient esoteric doctrine.⁶⁶ Here, then, we have it on the authority of modern Jewish scholars that the ancient secret tradition was in harmony with Christian teaching. But in the teaching of the later synagogue the philosophy of the earlier sages was narrowed down to suit the exclusive system of the Jewish hierarchy, and the ancient hope of a Redeemer who should restore Man to the state of felicity he had lost at the Fall was transformed into the idea of salvation for the Jews alone⁶⁷ under the ægis of a triumphant and even an avenging Messiah.⁶⁸ It is this Messianic dream perpetuated in the modern Cabala which nineteen hundred years ago the advent of Christ on earth came to disturb.

The Coming of the Redeemer

The fact that many Christian doctrines, such as the conception of a Trinity, the miraculous birth and murder of a Deity, had found a place in earlier religions has frequently been used as an argument to show that the story of Christ was merely a new version of various ancient legends, those of Attis, Adonis, or of Osiris, and that consequently the Christian religion is founded on a myth. The answer to this is that the existence of Christ on earth is an historic fact which no serious authority has ever denied. The attempts of such writers as Drews and J.M. Robertson to establish the theory of the Christ-Myth, which find an echo in the utterances of Socialist orators,⁶⁹ have been met with so much able criticism as to need no further refutation. Sir James Frazer, who will certainly not be accused of bigoted orthodoxy, observes in this connexion:

The doubts which have been cast on the historical reality of Jesus are, in my judgement, unworthy of serious attention.... To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth, as some would do, is hardly less absurd than it would be to do the same for Mohammed, Luther, and Calvin.⁷⁰

May not the fact that certain circumstances in the life of Christ were foreshadowed by earlier religions indicate, as Eliphas Lévi observes, that the ancients had an intuition of Christian mysteries?⁷¹

To those therefore who had adhered to the ancient tradition, Christ appeared as the fulfilment of a prophecy as old as the world. Thus the wise men came from afar to worship the Babe of Bethlehem, and when they saw His star in the East they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. In Christ they hailed not only Him who was born King of the Jews, but the Saviour of the whole human race.⁷²

In the light of this great hope, that wondrous night in Bethlehem is seen in all its sublimity. Throughout the ages the seers had looked for the coming of the Redeemer, and lo! He was here; but it was not to the mighty in Israel, to the High Priests and the Scribes, that His birth was announced, but to humble shepherds watching their flocks by night. And these men of simple faith, hearing from the angels the good tidings of great joy that a Saviour, Christ the Lord was born, went with haste to see the babe lying in the manger, and returned glorifying and praising God. So also to the devout in Israel, to Simeon and to Anna the prophetess, the great event appeared in its universal significance, and Simeon, departing in peace, knew that his eyes had seen the salvation that was to be a light to lighten the Gentiles as well as the glory of the people of Israel.

But to the Jews, in whose hands the ancient tradition had been turned to the exclusive advantage of the Jewish race, to the Rabbis, who had, moreover, constituted themselves the sole guardians within this nation of the said tradition, the manner of its fulfilment was necessarily abhorrent. Instead of a resplendent Messiah who should be presented by them to the people, a Saviour was born amongst the people themselves and brought to Jerusalem to be presented to the Lord; a Saviour moreover who, as time went on, imparted His divine message to the poor and humble and declared that His Kingdom was not of this world. This was clearly what Mary meant when she said that God had scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, that He had put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. Christ was therefore doubly hateful to the Jewish hierarchy in that He attacked the privilege of the race to which they belonged by throwing open the door to all mankind, and the privilege of the caste to which they belonged by revealing sacred doctrines to the profane and destroying their claim to exclusive knowledge.

Unless viewed from this aspect, neither the antagonism displayed by the Scribes and Pharisees towards our Lord nor the denunciations He uttered against them can be properly understood. Woe unto you, Lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.... Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: tor ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. What did Christ mean by the key of knowledge? Clearly the sacred tradition which, as Drach explains, foreshadowed the doctrines of Christianity.⁷³ It was the Rabbis who perverted that tradition, and thus "the guilt of these perfidious Doctors consisted in their concealing from